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Like all emoji, the bagel emoji is a tiny cartoon representation of its namesake, which is, again, a bagel. It is round like a bagel and brown like a bagel. It appears to be a plain bagel, which is not the best kind of bagel but also not the worst. It is a blank slate of a bagel —arguably, the bagel-iest kind of bagel, if not the most visually interesting. It is depicted sliced in half, and dry. Is this a good way to eat a bagel? No. Still, the image is very successful at doing its job, which is to communicate the concept of "bagel."

Bagel enthusiasts, though, were very upset. "Take a look at this clearly machine-cut monstrosity with its stiff and bready interior, which couldn't possibly be redeemed by a few minutes in a toaster," lamented Nikita Richardson at Grub Street. (Redemption is the only reason a bagel should ever be toasted, according to true bagel originalists; to toast a fresh bagel is a symptom of what former New York Times food critic and current culinary curmudgeon Mimi Sheraton calls a "decline in the craft of bagel making.")

[...] Part of the bagelmoji ire, explains Heather Schwedel at Slate, is a performance of discerning taste. "People want to demonstrate that they, unlike those emoji rubes, know from good bagels," she writes, noting that with much of the outcry coming from New York, "there may be some geographic snobbery going on too." A good way to prove you are a true New Yorker is to be extremely opinionated about bagels, whether real or pixelated.

[...] But as Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and creator of World Emoji Day, told CNN, people want to see themselves in their tiny icons. "Some of the most vocal requests for new emojis are about representation," he said. The dumpling, the taco, and the pan of paella, for example, all had extremely popular backing. Linguists may not consider emoji a language, Jennifer 8. Lee, the driving force behind the dumpling emoji, told the Atlantic, but "for people who use them, it's almost like fighting for a word that [shows] you exist. When you come up with a word to describe your population, it's a very powerful thing."

Responding to criticism about the placement of cheese on Google's version of the cheeseburger emoji, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that he would take a look at the issue immediately. "Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday :) if folks can agree on the correct way to do this!" Pichai tweeted.

Pichai was responding to author Thomas Baekdal, who pointed out the difference in cheese placement between Apple's and Google's cheeseburger emojis. "I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, which Apple puts on top," Baekdal tweeted.

The tweet ignited a debate about where the different ingredients of a cheeseburger belong. Among all the different cheeseburger emoji variants offered by various tech companies, Google's is the only version to place the cheese below the meat, according to images of cheeseburger emojis from Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook and others, as seen on Emojipedia. It's generally accepted that cheeseburger cheese should be placed directly on the meat patty for optimal melting.

Apple has been sued over its use of the "Animoji" trademark. Apple uses the name for its iPhone X feature that allows users to control and send emoji using their own facial expressions. Apple claims that the trademark is invalid:

A Japanese company, which owns the trademark for "Animoji" in the US, is suing Apple for using the word to name its iPhone X feature. The Tokyo-based company, Emonster, filed the suit on Wednesdayin US federal court, saying, "Apple made the conscious decision to try to pilfer the name for itself." The company's CEO, Enrique Bonansea, is a US citizen living in Japan.

Emonster owns an iOSapp called Animoji that launched in 2014, which lets people send emoji that are animated in a loop like GIFs. The app asks you to compose the message kind of like how you would format a line of code in Python or Javascript, with parentheses and brackets that separate the kinds of effects you want to add to text or emoji. The app costs $0.99 on iTunes.

Emonster claims that Apple knew about the trademark and offered to buy it, but was turned down. Emonster has owned the "animoji" trademark since 2015, but Apple filed a petition to cancel the trademark on the grounds that EMONSTER, INC. was dissolved in the State of Washington in 2004 and did not exist when the trademark application was filed on August 20, 2014 by Enrique Bonansea, who identified himself as the President of EMONSTER, INC.

The argument over the emoji is between developers working with the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit corporation that develops, maintains and promotes software internationalization standards. The committee is currently considering implementing a number of new emojis next year, but the frowning poo emoji alone has caused some members to become rather upset.

According to documents obtained by Buzzfeed, objections have been made on the grounds that the proposed emoji is a poor choice. "Organic waste isn't cute ... It is bad enough that the [Emoji Subcommittee] came up with it, but it beggars belief that the [Unicode Technical Committee] actually approved it ... The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence," one person wrote. "Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC?"

Another person wrote, "I'm concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of PILE OF POO emoji with emotions, such as CRYING PILE OF POO, PILE OF POO WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, PILE OF POO SCREAMING IN FEAR, etc. Is there really any need to add a range of emotions to PILE OF POO? I personally think that changing PILE OF POO to a de facto SMILING PILE OF POO was wrong, but adding F|FROWNING PILE OF POO as a counterpart is even worse. If this is accepted then there will be no neutral, expressionless PILE OF POO, so at least a PILE OF POO WITH NO FACE would be required to be encoded to restore some balance."

Security researchers at the U.S. Naval Academy, together with the University of Maryland Baltimore County, published a study showing how a casual onlooker can visually memorize a person's pattern then recreate it with ease. In the tests, they found that two out of three people were able to recreate six-point unlock patterns purely by looking at them from 5 or 6 feet away.

[...] Those same conditions were then replicated with a more traditional six-digit PIN code, which proved far more difficult, with only one out of 10 observers able to recreate the PIN code after peeking.

With multiple chances to view your pattern or pin, the ability of an observer to unlock your phone grows:

In the online tests, 64 percent were able to recreate the Android-style pattern after merely one viewing, but that shot up to 80 percent after a second viewing. PIN codes, meanwhile, rendered much lower vulnerability percentages: only 11 percent were able to identify a six-digit PIN after viewing it once, and 27 percent after viewing it twice.

Apple's new FaceID, previously covered Here on SN and explained more fully on Techcrunch's extensive article has its own problems and annoyances, as well as the fear of being grabbed by police, cuffed, and your phone being held in front of your face before you have time to hit 5 button presses it takes to shut off FaceID. The phone is too new for any independent tests to have been run using pictures or movies of your face.

Apple has reportedly dismissed an engineer after his daughter's iPhone X hands-on video went viral on YouTube. Brooke Amelia Peterson published a vlog earlier this week, which included a trip to the Apple campus to visit her father and see an unreleased iPhone X. Peterson's video was quickly picked up by sites like 9to5Mac, and it spread even further on YouTube.

Peterson now claims her father has been fired as a result of her video. In a tearful video, Peterson explains her father violated an Apple company rule by allowing her to film the unreleased handset at Apple's campus. Apple reportedly requested that Peterson remove the video, but it was clearly too late as the content spread further and further.

"He takes full responsibility for letting me film his iPhone X. Apple let him go. At the end of the day, when you work for Apple, it doesn't matter how good of a person you are. If you break a rule, they just have no tolerance. They had to do what they had to do. I'm not mad at Apple. I'm not gonna stop buying Apple products. Rules are in place for the happiness and for the safety of workers."

Will Mr. Peterson get sued if he tries to work somewhere else in Silicon Valley?

Re:control of the poo emoji with your own face.Re:control of the poo emoji with your own face.(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday September 15 2017, @01:52PM
(4 children)

$999 is cheap; just look at how much this phone costs in Europe. Apparently a bunch of Europeans have been looking into flying to the US to buy the thing because it's so much cheaper here; they can get "free" airfare for the difference.

Of course, they could be smart and just buy an inexpensive Android phone at home instead and save their money, but apparently there's plenty of idiots over there too (and here on this site as well; I'm sure I'll have some stupid Apple koolaid-drinker chiming in to tell me how wonderful the iPhone X is and how it's worth every penny).

Re:control of the poo emoji with your own face.(Score: 3, Interesting) by quacking duck on Friday September 15 2017, @07:27PM

Of course, they could be smart and just buy an inexpensive Android phone at home instead and save their money, but apparently there's plenty of idiots

I wonder who the extra-special idiots are that buy the *expensive* Androids, then, like the Galaxy S8 ($720) and Note 4 ($930). After all, Android users don't have the excuse Apple users do of being locked into one company's ecosystem.

Re:control of the poo emoji with your own face.Re:control of the poo emoji with your own face.(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 15 2017, @09:45PM
(1 child)

US prices don't, but even when you apply sales tax to the US price it's still a lot cheaper, and it seems more than the difference between typical US sales tax rates (5-10%) and EU VAT rates (15%? I think).

It's really not usual for a lot of consumer goods to cost significantly less in the US than in other industrialized nations, even after taking into account the taxing differences. Though I do wish Congress would pass a law requiring goods and services to be labeled with the after-tax prices (though this would be complicated in online sales, or places where they need to quote a pre-tax price because they don't know which state or locality you're in). They should also pass a law banning all non-state sales taxes while they're at it; that shit just complicates everything. And non-state income taxes too. And if there's some Constitutional challenge to the non-state sales tax law, then Congress should pass an alternate law banning states from collecting sales taxes across borders, just as a big F-U to the states for having ridiculously complicated taxing schemes and then insisting on online sellers thousands of miles away figuring that shit out and sending in taxes. I'd be happy to see all internet sales warehouses relocated to New Hampshire and Montana because these stupid states couldn't simplify things on their own and all these stupid localities insisted on their own sales taxes.

Truly, the end is nigh...Truly, the end is nigh...(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 15 2017, @09:33AM
(1 child)

That said, the link to the YouTube video is impressive. Scary, but impressive. Essentially, this makes it easy to distort any video. Just as a minor-but-obvious example: imagine the potential for political campaigns. Facial expressions say more than we know. Add a frown, maybe a smirk, and alter the entire impact of a sentence.

--Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.

Re:Truly, the end is nigh...(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Friday September 15 2017, @06:16PM

I watched a demo, a decade ago, of a program which could easily change the facial features of an actress moving around in a typical-looking video.Guy clicked a few buttons, and in five minutes she went from white to asian.

Everything can be doctored. Doing it in real-time has been possible in HD for a while. Doing it at decent quality in real-time HD with a hand-held battery-powered device is a sign humans aren't completely worthless (though wasteful).

Re:Dafuq did I just read?(Score: 2) by meustrus on Monday September 18 2017, @01:02AM

Doesn't look like they majored in much of anything. White people using "default" emoji is basically the definition of white privilege. No need to talk about "shame". Not that the idea is particularly well supported by the guy's own charts.

Besides, you ought to know better. The Atlantic is the liberal media they warned you about.

--If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?

Matrox had a product about 10-15 years ago that used something like the Face2Face algorithm for video conferencing over a MODEM. The camera would track your face movements and then it would distort an image of your face at the remote end to mirror your movements. The actions were a much lower-bandwidth stream than the images, so you could do full videoconferencing over a low-bandwidth link. I wonder if FaceTime is going to get similar support.

Spread news of this far and wide(Score: 3, Insightful) by Scrutinizer on Friday September 15 2017, @02:03PM

Not so much the poo, but the Face2Face technology. Like any technology, it can be used for good or ill, and it doesn't take much imagination to think of some ills. (You could just watch the 1987 film The Running Man [imdb.com] for a fictional use of this technology, in which a good cop is framed in place of murderous cops.)

Trying to stop the advance of technology is largely futile, and also welcomes in questionable company [arstechnica.com]. Alternatively, spreading knowledge of technology far and wide can help limit the impact of nefarious use, in this case either through heightened awareness that such high-quality manipulation of video is possible, or perhaps by encouraging a shift towards encoding digital media with cryptographic fingerprints to hamper and reveal any editing shennanigans made possible by Face2Face or other useful but potentially deceptive media editing tech.

This is not new.(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Friday September 15 2017, @02:43PM

I don't know, us "millennials" have been fighting your oil wars for sixteen years this fall while you boomers continue to wreck our nation by bringing in cheap criminal labor from Mexico, buying five fucking beach houses and then making the government pay for them when they fall into the sea (a trend which started with Hurricane Hugo), and then driving up the costs of tuition for profit while making student loan debt never fucking disappear even through bankruptcy while you allow "dreamers" to go to school for free.